| Strange Baryon Production in Pb--Pb Collisions at 158 (2007) | |||||||||||||
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| The first results on fully corrected , \Xi, and\Omega particle production obtained by the WA97 experiment in Pb--Pb and p--Pb collisions are presented. 1 Introduction An enhanced production of strange particles has been suggested long ago as a useful diagnostic tool in heavy ion reactions since flavour equilibration times are expected to be much shorter in a Quark--Gluon Plasma(QGP) than in a Hadron Gas [1, 2, 3, 4]. In particular, multi-strange (anti-)baryons can be expected to probe the early phase of the collision [5], since hadronic production of such particles is suppressed due to high mass thresholds while in a QGP scenario they can be easily created due to a copious production of strange quark pairs from gluons. An enhanced production of multistrange (anti-)baryons has already been observed in sulphur initiated reactions by the WA85 and WA94 collaborations [6, 7] and the WA97 experiment has extended this study to a Pb--Pb system. We shall present a comparison of the Pb--Pb resu... | |||||||||||||
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